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Issue VII

Cannabis

If the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world’s ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism.

— Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father [...]

It’s the 70s again; political apocalypse and flower power. As bodies despair at digitalisation and its alienation there is a pitch into eden fever, downloading Shazam for plants and foraging for remedies. Bedrooms smell of palo santo, jasmine oil, organic cannabis again. When they go low, we get high.

Hemp is a magical and sacred plant with myriad uses; it’s heralded as a shamanic healing plant, with cannabinoids (aka “miracle molecules”) and their synergistic euphoriant effects. THC is analgesic, anti-emetic, anti-proliferative, antioxidant. CBD is neuroprotective; it alleviates cramps, inflammation, cough, nausea, anxiety, inhibits growth of certain cancer cells, eases pain and reduces inflammation. cannabis is medicine. Some esteem it as an industrial dream for its sustainability and processing potential. But Mother nature provides where ‘mother’ is a verb. We must take care to get care, plants heal when tended to.

Cannabis culture, its legalisation and its integration into polite society produces a politics of race, class and health that runs the risk of rebranding cannabis use as chic, white, and tripping into anarchically appropriative new age culture. The history of its classification was always racialized; indeed the origin of the word ‘marijuana’ was Harry Anslinger’s attempt to create an association with the Latino community, in particular accusation of Mexican labourers. With its move away from radicalised social contingents - no longer bearing strict association with rastafarian devotees/politicised left wing hippies - there comes a shift in its aesthetics.

The gentrification of what was once conceived as a socially dangerous substance brings a technology of drug use, convoluted paraphernalia, smoking as lifestyle choice, it becomes part of the fabric of wellness, produces cannabis connoisseurs. As with all codified rituals that shift from rebellious to kosher you see a displacement of vernacular, context and narrative. Whether weed’s particular alchemy develops a legible cultural signification beyond Rihanna's smoking glamorisation remains in development. Weed as sexy/weed as medical.

Hemp may be a useful, artistic, healing, inspiring herb – one among many psychoactive plants. A relationship with hemp, as with all relationships may involve a negotiation between respect and abuse, pleasure and discomfort, or expansion and contraction. It can be put to earnest spiritual/psychonautic use, it can soothe, but it can also, because of its residual illegality, be yoked to the violent economics of drug trafficking. In a ritually purified state, though, it might have paradigmatic social consequences; a culture that worships alcohol has a different psyche to one that is hemp devout. In our steady retreat into nature we can choose which spirits we best commune with, alcoholic or herbal. Pick your poison, pick your medicine.

— Alessandro Bava and Rebecca Sharp

  • Alessandro Mensi
  • Benjamin Whitley
  • Brett Lloyd
  • Christopher Viaggio
  • Daniel Espinoza
  • Davide Stucchi
  • Easyjoint
  • Ella Plevin/Claude Gerber
  • EM Rooney
  • Forensic Architecture
  • Gauntlett Cheng
  • GMBH
  • Herb Essentials
  • Holly White
  • Jack Gross
  • Jakob Landvik
  • Jared Madere
  • Karl Holmqvist
  • Kathryn Garcia
  • Kulisek_Lieske
  • Lara Joy Evans
  • Lee Lozano
  • Liam Den Hamer
  • Lucy Chinen
  • Matilde Cerruti Quara
  • Megan Capps
  • Michael Dean
  • Naoki Sutter-Shudo
  • Nik Kosmas
  • Nonfood
  • NO SESSO
  • PHIPPS
  • Pieter Jossa
  • Rada Kozelj
  • Reese-Rios
  • Richard Kern
  • Ruben Gutierrez
  • Sara Grace Powell/Thistle Brown
  • Stefan Schwartzman
  • Studio Miessen
  • Talk Hole
  • Thomas Cao
  • Veronica Gelbaum
  • Veterans For Cannabis
  • Whitney Mallett
Issue VI

Queer

Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.

-José Esteban Muñoz,
Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity [...]

Yesterday I found myself at one of the last shows of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, in Providence, Rhode Island. I had just left a meeting with two other members of IQECO, where we discussed the types of invisible labor being done by plankton (plus other microbial Foundation Species) and queer (human) communities. When I arrived at the circus, then, I found myself still burdened with criticality.

When the lights went out and spotlights hit a cage in the center of the arena, 12 tigers were sitting on stools and I braced myself for an unnerving show. A large man with dueling whips lashed the tigers, ordering the cats to jump, roar, stand, and move about. I sank lower into my chair, feeling rather microbial as a crowd of thousands clapped and screamed in excitement at the spectacle of human supremacy.

Our simplified collective understanding of human gender and sexuality collapses on itself when we are confronted by a fungus with 28,000 sexes. Catriona Sandilands states (while discussing the works of Elizabeth Wilson and Myra Hird) that “nonhuman sexual and gender diversity both calls into question human exceptionalism and destabilizes notions of identity, authenticity, and technology on which modern categories of human sexual orientation rest.” The research is overwhelming and powerful, as exemplified by the enduring influence of Bruce Bagemihl’s seminal text, Biological Exuberance. Bagemihl’s book about animals with homosexual tendencies was used as evidence by the American Psychiatric Association before the US Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas, a case that ultimately struck down sodomy laws in 14 states.

Edited by Lee Pivnik for the Institute of Queer Ecology

  • Bruce Bagemihl
  • Urban Barnyard
  • Alessandro Bava
  • Andrej Dubravsky
  • Ryan Hammond
  • Liby Hays
  • Caspar Heinemann
  • Alex Ju
  • Exene Karros
  • Les U . Knight
  • Lee Pivnik
  • Isabella Rossellini
  • Jack Schneider
  • Greta Skagerlind
  • Briohny Walker
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Issue V

Narcissism

Narcissus is pretty. Narcissus doesn’t love you.

ECOCORE exploits Narcissus as the symbol of the modern subject. Our imagination of the subject is made intricate by new perspectives on identity, the virtual, transcendence and how our aesthetic embodiment relates to capitalism. What are we as subjects and why is this question so often explored as a discourse of the body? What is our ‘nature’, and how do we get to it? How do we commune with the external as if it weren’t hostile? How do we cultivate an environment we want to participate in? Our psychic/social ecology meets with the environmental in haemorrhage of inner to outer. [...]

Narcissism is pathologised as a personality disorder/a phenomenon/a force that affects our precarious relation to the other. Our tech-driven, screen-gazing society enables a solipsistic narcissism, to the extent that we can identify it as typical of our cultural mood, our pixelated age. Narcissism is easily read as a destructive impulse towards extinguishing otherness, but is also identified as a traumatised and debilitated loving in which the only happy love can be the contained self-love by which all libidinal investment belongs to the ego.

Your mouth is the only part of yourself that you can kiss in the mirror.

  • Beach 61, Berlin, Summer 2016
  • Gabriele Beveridge
  • Martin Soto Climent
  • Patrizio di Massimo
  • Buck Ellison
  • DeSe Escobar
  • Seth Fluker
  • Isa Genzken
  • Rochelle Goldberg
  • Ethan James Green
  • Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings
  • Richard Hawkins
  • Lukas Hofmann
  • Lars TCF Holdhus / TCF Tea
  • Adrian Manuel Huber
  • Benjamin Ahmed Huseby
  • Emily Jones
  • Marie Karlberg
  • Veit Laurent Kurz
  • Paul Levack
  • Stefanos Mandrake
  • Marco Pio Mucci
  • Josip Novosel
  • Lisa Radon
  • Stefan Schwarzman
  • Ser Brandon Castro Serpas
  • SSTMRT
  • Anthony Symonds
  • Frances Stark
  • Thomas Tait
  • Anna Uddenberg
  • Francesco Vezzoli
  • Tore Wallert
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Issue IV

G( )D

The G( )D issue seeks to explore G( )D as an ethical mechanism within deep ecology, biocentrism and nature’s profound mysteries. Deep ecology has emerged as a ‘secular’ proposal to reinstate spiritual intimacy and reverence for the earth. Nature has ended, meanwhile we enter into the new ideological sphere of ‘environmentalism’, directly subject to human action. Environmental crisis changes the basic facts behind the spiritual meaning of the world around us; presented as God’s creation, ‘Nature’ and what it signifies metaphysically has been perverted. In an age where fanatical and self-righteous lifestyle choices, kale tribes, health ‘binges’, fairtrade coffee (the price of staving off perdition included in the price of the cappuccino) tenuously abate a sense of guilt within consumerism. [...]

Ecology is the oldest and newest religion; a moral claim that nature has inherent value. Nature itself is calling for an end to instrumentalism and anthropocentrism, asking for us to reconstruct an idealised state of wilderness according to utopian values. ECOCORE questions the possibility of embracing the elusive nature of ecological systems, admitting to the limits of science when met with enigmas such as Higgs Boson or the ‘God particle’, in search of men's place in the continuity between science and mystery. Is it possible to restructure a future according to a biospiritual agenda in which pollution is in decline, agriculture is sustainable, and species are revived? ECOCORE The G( )D Issue looks at discussing the role eco-anxiety, ecoterrorism, ecofeminism, anthropocene theories, and radical environmentalist groups have to play in the restructuring of our contemporary ideology and our collective spiritual reactions to the environment. ECOCORE IV ventures to propose a politics of paradise, working on the principle that nature is sacred.

Ecocore IV : The G( )D issue was supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts

  • Rosa Aiello
  • Alessandro Bava
  • Josh Bitelli
  • Juliette Bonneviot
  • Dora Budor
  • Harry Burke
  • Anne De Vries
  • Alex Mackin Dolan
  • Cedric Fargues
  • Caspar Jade Heinmann
  • Oskar Kahn
  • Pablo Larios
  • Luis Miguel Bendaña + Sam Lipp
  • Alexander May
  • Jacopo Mazzetti
  • Aaron McLaughlin
  • Anna Mikkola
  • Samia Mirza
  • Rasmus Myrup
  • Katja Novitskova
  • Palace
  • Octave Perrault
  • Greg Ponchak
  • Billy Rennekamp
  • Jack Self
  • Sydney Shen
  • Eric Veit
  • Albin Werle
Issue III

Fo.Od

The Fo.Od issue aims to exploit a classic lifestyle magazine format for its own statements about the intricacies, mysteries and image of food. [...]

Those of us living in a food culture defined by abundance relate to food in a way that is often perversely abstracted; organic food becomes a way of recreating nature by means of technology and we are consistently subject to the enigmas of GMO alchemy. The Fo.Od issue seeks to contextualise ‘the modern diet’ in relation to power structures, governmental exertions of influence and cultural ideals, whereby the Western model becomes ‘we are what we eat’ by virtue of the notion that ‘the body is the home of the soul’. The liturgy of contemporary lifestyle enables food to become a means of achieving purity, the denial of food a form of ascetic righteousness. Meanwhile, due to the systematic privatization of nature, commodification of food, and commercial management of human life, a global coordinated effort is obliged to regulate surplus and plenitude vs ‘food insecurity’. Unethical distribution underpins the notion of the industrial food economy as an unnatural mechanism. ECOCORE brings together artists, critical essays, and visual essays, that all have ecology and biopower at their heart, presenting a visual feast paralleled by a discussion of the moral and political economy of hunger and the biopolitics of food as an industry.

  • AA-DRL
  • Darren Bader
  • Alessandro Bava
  • Diane Bisson
  • Biayna Bogosian
  • Carlo Cracco
  • Gerald Domenig
  • Zachary Fluker
  • Manuele Gaioni
  • Yngve Holen
  • Oscar Khan
  • Nik Kosmas
  • Peter Lippmann
  • Tobias Madison
  • Luke Moore
  • Marlie Mul
  • Michelle Obama
  • Paul Outerbridge
  • Irving Penn
  • Hayley Aviva Silverman
  • Lucie Stahl
  • Francis Bitonti Studio
  • Dena Yago
Issue II

Dolphin

The Dolphin Issue reports from the fantastic world of the Ocean and its most human creatures, the Dolphins: facts, fantasies, conspiracies. [...]

It includes brazilian dolphins by Vincent Bevins, an essay by 16th century philosopher Giordano Bruno, an interview with Evo Morales, computational architecture, a photo-essay by Steven Meisel; sexy Mermaids, outdoor homos, anarcho-pauperism, biomorphic media theories, Kafka, beautiful nature, Aldo Rossi, an horoscope, net-community masterpieces; works from artists: Aids-3D, Marlie Mul, Cab Broskoski; and a large fiction section curated by Christopher Glazek.

  • Aids 3d
  • Daniel Ayat
  • Donald Barthelme
  • Silvio Berlusconi
  • Vincent Bevins
  • Cab Broskoski
  • Giordano Bruno
  • Grasshopper Community
  • Alexis de Toqueville
  • Nathaniel deLarge
  • Christopher Glazek
  • Franz Kafka
  • Annie Leiboviz
  • Steven Meisel
  • Evo Morales
  • Marlie Mul
  • Epic/g.Morales B. Oknyansky
  • Matteo Pasquinelli
  • Aldo Rossi
  • Thomas Ruff
  • Karley Sciortino
  • Bruce Weber
  • Timothy Whillie
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Issue I

e-den

e-den Issue explores the idea of e-den.

It includes borderline techno-primitivism, anti-globalism, beauty, whole foods, a Manifesto for Guerrilla Ecology, an interview with Julian Assange, Louis Vuitton, original comissions by various artists (including Juan Antonio Olivares, Greg Fong, Ryan Foerster), surveys on Cloud Computing and Biofuels, an essay on political ecology and spatial practice, net poetry, Neri Oxman, essays from Pierre Klossowski and Felix Guattari. [...]

  • Julian Assange
  • Biothing
  • David de Rothschild
  • Disney
  • ecoLogicStudio
  • Ryan Foerster
  • Greg Fong
  • National Geographic
  • Felix Guattari
  • Jordan Bunny Kinney
  • Nicki Minaj
  • Gabriel Morales
  • Philippe Morel
  • Brittany Murphy
  • Barack Obama
  • Juan Antonio Olivares
  • Neri Oxman
  • Matteo Pasquinelli
  • PETA
  • Probotics
  • Isabella Rossellini
  • Louis Vuitton

About

Editor: Alessandro Bava
Associate Editor: Rebecca Sharp

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Ecocore is an independent editorial platform which explores the camouflaged souls of ecology with an irregularely published zine and other events and projects. Ecocore advocates for ecology and an holistic approach to understanding and protecting nature from the unique point of view of theory, aesthetics and culture.

Press: i-D

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